Day 262

..Ok maybe we weren’t as spry and ready to get moving in the morning as we though... we planned on leaving at first light, but who needs plans? At 7am Grama woke up and was hollering for me to get my...butt... out of bed and by 7:15 we were well underway.

It was a long day and there were a few stressful moments with the amount of traffic since it was the last day of the holiday weekend. And you can’t have a long day on the ICW without going hard aground. Those are just rules. If you travel the ICW you need to be prepared for:
1) Power-boaters who think it’s funny to see how fast they can pass you and how much wake they can create.
2) You need to be ready to dodge tons of crab pots.
3) You need to be ready for the invasion of a million freaken horse flies that cover every inch of canvas onboard.
4) And most of all you need patience. This is for when you think you’re done for the night after more than 10 hours underway and are looking for an anchorage... then you go so hard aground that there is nothing you can do to get off. You try lowering the dingy off the foredeck and putting the motor on and trying to pull the boat off...and push the boat off...and then call Tow Boat US to come save the day. Then when all that is done and your finally free you get to travel another hour to find the narrowest anchorage that unless desperate (since the sun was setting and a storm fast approaching we qualified for desperate) it is said no one anchors there anymore. It is now that everyone onboard needs extreme patience to get the hook down without killing each other.

Traveling the Inter Coastal Waterway is not for the faint of heart lmao. I’m alive to type this out at 10:31pm so I think all in all it was an ok day. We travelled 70miles (statured not nautical unfortunately) so now we only have 809.2miles left in the ICW (Norfolk, VA is the end of the ICW).

Just reading over this I realize how sarcastic and pissy it makes me sound lol. I would never say I’m not sarcastic or pissy (Grama calls me pissy all the time) but tonight’s turned out to be a nice night, hot as hell, but nice. We’re all in good moods and feel like we’ve accomplished something today, but looking back...well when I think about all the things I ‘endured’ it really amounts to nothing other than constant annoyances, mainly due to the amount of people and I don’t remember it driving me so over the edge on our way down. The Bahamas had been isolated...the exumas atleast... and now the constant buzz of people is exciting yes but there is no more peaceful nights with no unnatural noise, there is no more turquoise water, no more watching for starfish and sharks, no more Bahamas time and (don’t let papa read this or he will be dancing around saying ‘I told you so!’ lol) I kinda miss it. I feel like a horse that’s headed back for the barn, pulling at the bit and traveling as fast as we can, and I’m dying to get home...but I’ve made up my mind that at some point I have to go back to the Bahamas, step back out of the busy rush north Americans live for and get back on Island time =]

Niki